Questions
by Laura Schiller
Summary: Missing scene from 10.1, "The Pilot". Bill sees the Doctor's face in a photograph of her mother. She's not about to let that go.


Questions

By Laura Schiller

Based on: Doctor Who

Copyright: BBC

"Did you know my mum?"

They'd been discussing Voltaire and the Enlightenment, so the question, posed in Bill's usual abrupt manner, took the Doctor by surprise. She sat with one leg drawn up, hands clasped around her knee, staring at him as intently as if she could read her own family history in his face.

"What makes ye say that?" he prevaricated, calling himself twelve kinds of idiot in his head.

He might have known traveling back in time to take those photos was a bad idea. Foolish. Sentimental. Bill Potts was a smart girl; becoming her tutor was a logical thing to do. That didn't mean he had to pry into her past. He always hated it when people tried to do that with him, after all.

But on the other hand, he couldn't forget the tone of Bill's voice, when she'd confessed to imagining things about the mother she'd never known. If there was one thing in the universe sadder than losing a loved one, it would have to be never knowing her.

She raised her bright brown eyes to the ceiling and scoffed. "Uh, _this_?"

She fished a Polaroid photograph out of her bag and held it under his nose.

He had to lean back in order to see clearly. It showed Mina Potts, who really did look a lot like her daughter, wearing a red top and denim cutoffs and glancing over her shoulder at the camera. She looked faintly annoyed, but also tolerant, as if she liked the person taking her picture even if she disliked being taken by surprise.

Behind her, in the corner of an ornate round mirror, was an older white man holding up a camera. The image was blurred, but for someone who knew the Doctor's current face well, it was unmistakable.

"I did know her, yes," said the Doctor, deciding that an edited version of the truth was probably simpler. "We were colleagues, once. Worked in an antiques shop together back in the nineties."

For about two weeks, to be exact, while he routed out an infestation of Cybermites and took pictures whenever he could.

"An antiques shop?" Bill grinned. "What was she like?"

"Like you. Bright. Funny. Incredibly nosy."

Bill's grin widened.

"There was nothing she couldn't fix, too. With a screwdriver in her hand, she was a force to reckon with." Sonic screwdrivers included.

"I'm always the one to fix things round the house," said Bill. "Sinks, toilets, shelves … My foster mum's hopeless at that stuff."

As if the words "foster mum" had reminded her that she was an orphan, her smile faded. She twisted one of her curls around her finger, frowning, a rare look on her and one he did not like.

"So do you know who my dad is?" she blurted out, as if the question were a splinter that had to be pulled.

"No," he said, as gently as he could. "She was pregnant already when I met her. She never talked about him."

"Oh." Bill lowered her head so that he couldn't see her eyes. "Okay. I mean, no big deal. I was just curious."

Emotional intelligence might not have been his strong point, but even he could see that it _was_ a "big deal". He had an absurd impulse to snatch one of those wild curls off her head, run it through DNA testing, track down her biological father and shake the man by the collar like a dog. What kind of man would do that - walk away from the woman he loved?

He glanced at the pictures of River and Susan on his desk. _Oh. Right._

"I will say this, though," he said gruffly. "She looked forward to havin' ye. Drove the rest of us clean daft with her talk about ultrasounds and cribs."

Bill sniffed and wiped her eyes with her knuckles, and for a moment, he was terrified he'd said the wrong thing after all. But when she looked up at him, she was smiling all over her face.

Her coloring couldn't have been more different, but in that second, she reminded him quite shockingly of Susan. He half expected her to jump up from her seat and give him a granddaughter's hug.

"Okay, okay." He pushed his chair back with a creak and headed over to the bookshelf. "That's enough time wasted for today. Didn't I tell you I'm particular about time? Did ye finish yer readin' assignment for today?"

"If you mean that speech of Robespierre's, yeah, and it scared the crap out of me."

They proceeded to talk eighteenth-century political theory with all their might, but every time the Doctor caught Bill's eyes, he found the same affectionate twinkle. They were friends now, there was no denying it.

Which meant, as always, that his life was about to get complicated.


End file.
